Issue #223

Mar 1 2018

Editor Picks

The Hit Charade: Challenge of Algorithmic Creativity
Just as computers cannot yet create powerful and imaginative art or prose, they cannot truly appreciate music. And arranging a poignant or compelling music playlist takes a type of insight they don’t have—the ability to find similarities in musical elements and to get the emotional resonance and cultural context of songs. For all the progress being made in artificial intelligence, machines are still hopelessly unimaginative and predictable. This is why Apple has hired hundreds of people to serve as DJs and playlist makers, in addition to the algorithmic recommendations it still offers...

Pass the Butter // Pancake botMy goal is to train a robotic arm to make pancakes. As a first test, curriculum learning was used to get the arm to toss a pancake onto a plate. My motivation for the project is my complete lack of cooking ability...

A Message from this week's Sponsor:

Springboard’s Data Science Career Track is designed to get you hired. With 1-on-1 mentorship, career coaching, and personalized support, you’ll gain the portfolio, skills, and confidence you need to get hired in a new role.

When asked about her experience, Springboard alumni Melanie shared “Springboard provides a lot of the resources to make sure you stay on track, either from your mentor or the very active discussion boards. I really enjoyed doing the capstone projects. They allowed me to apply the skills we were learning toward projects I was passionate about and provided me with great speaking points while interviewing.”

Piccolo is building a gesture-based smart home ‘vision assistant’Voice assistants may be the hottest thing since sliced bread when it comes to controlling your $60 Wi-Fi light bulbs, but Piccolo is launching out of the latest Y Combinator class with a desire to put a camera in every smart home that can translate your physical motions and gestures into commands...

A Comparative Analysis of Top 6 BI and Data Visualization Tools in 2018Nowadays, there is a huge list of powerful visualization tools to help you illustrate your ideas, visualize your data, make it talk, share your significant analytics with customers and the global community. In this article, we will compare the most commonly used platforms and analyze their main features to help you choose one or several platforms that will provide indispensable aid for your work communication...

Neural Spelling Corrections and the Importance of AccuracyThe days of ‘query engineering’ are almost a thing of the past, made obsolete by Google’s ability to almost intuitively know what we are actually hoping to find. For better or worse, Google has trained us to expect great results with a simple set of keywords, malformed questions, and careless spelling. The last point is something I would like to discuss in a bit more detail, and how we at Scribd attempted to solve it using neural networks...

DeepPavlovOpen-source library for building chatbots, built on top of TensorFlow & Keras...

Training & Resources

Calculate Column Sum In TensorFlowLearn how to do a column sum in TensorFlow using tf.reduce_sum to get the sum of all of the elements in the columns of a Tensor, via a screencast video and full tutorial transcript...

Learn with Google AIWhether you're just learning to code or you're a seasoned machine learning practitioner, you'll find information and exercises in this resource center to help you develop your skills and advance your projects...

How to build a deep learning model in 15 minutesAs Instacart has grown, we’ve learned a few things the hard way. We’re open sourcing Lore, a framework to make machine learning approachable for Engineers and maintainable for Machine Learning Researchers...

Books

"The book goes well beyond "big data" to unpack the possibilities of doing social science research at a massive scale, and relatively inexpensively. This book should be read by social scientists who want to expand their research horizons, data scientists who want to understand how to incorporate the insights of social science, and anyone in a line of work in which they have potential data that can give them insights into how people behave..."